Abstract: The American Physical Society has just released a new version of their
REVTEX authoring package, REVTEX version 4.0. The revtex4 document
class for LATEX2e is completely new code, not a rewrite of REVTEX
version 3.1. Those preparing electronic submissions to APS journals, like
Physical Review, to American Institute of Physics journals, or to Optical
Society of America journals will use revtex4, available via
http://publish.aps.org/revtex4 and on CTAN.

The revtex4 document class allows the user to prepare a LaTeX document
that will be suitable for electronic submission to any of the
subscribing journals, without further alteration. The formatting details
connected with a particular target journal are entirely taken care of by
a single document class option. For example, a submission to Physical
Review Letters would contain the simple statement:

\documentclass[prl]{revtex4}

If targetting the Reviews of Modern Physics, the ``prl'' is changed to
``rmp''. Within the document itself, the syntax is unaltered.

Version 4 contains most of the features of the considerably outdated
REVTEX 3.1, with considerably more powerful formatting. It is capable
of all of the features of LaTeX's twocolumn style, but in addition allows
switching to or from a one-column page layout anywhere on the page. A
number of bugs in LaTeX have been fixed, among them the infamous
``eqnarray'' spacing problem. Title page information, in the past
restricted to, e.g.,
\author, \title and \thanks, now accomodate all of
the required features of academic journals.

The document class has been expressly designed for compatability with
the longtable package, and fixes a number of that package's limitations,
such as its inability to work in a multicolumn page layout. REVTEX is
also compatible with such popular LATEX extensions as hyperref, url,
and array. Patrick Daly's natbib package is always loaded by revtex4, and
his custom-bib package has been used to create BibTEX styles for APS
journals.

The revtex4 class incorporates two new LATEX packages,
ltxutil and
ltxgrid,
which are available separately for public use under the LATEX Project Public License (LPPL). The latter package, based on code
developed by William E. Baxter, provides a completely rewritten output
routine for LATEX, one that has far fewer limitations, and which fixes
many of LATEX's bugs.

The revtex4 class is adaptable far beyond APS and OSA journals; users in
our beta testing program have employed it for submissions to other
journals, for the production of monographs, conference proceedings, and
more. As well, the revtex4 document class provides an extensible
architecture for other societies and journals to use: all of its
APS-specific features are collected into a ``sub-package'', called
aps.rtx. Those wishing to customize revtex4 to their own journals are
encouraged to write their own .rtx file.

The revtex4 document class is the responsibility of the American
Physical Society's Mark Doyle; the first draft was written by David P. Carlisle.